It might be worth your time to check out a new work by Ed Komoszewski, Daniel Wallace, and M. James Sawyer, Reinventing Jesus: What The Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You (Kregel [May 2006]).

The inimitable Steve Hays has posted a review of the work here, and more information still can be found at this website.

At this point in our series we will turn to Abraham Kuyper. We should hasten to add that we must dismiss the suggestion that Van Til totally rejects Warfield and wholly accepts Kuyper.

Not so. We happen to believe that Kuyper is correct in recognizing that the antithesis between belief and unbelief is absolute in principle. However, he apparently failed to understand how this antithesis works itself out in history.

We have already noted that Kuyper works with what might best be labeled a territorial view of the belief/unbelief antithesis and common grace. I suspect this sets up a see-saw relationship between the two so that Kuyper must account for what looks to him like areas of neutrality or practices which are not affected by the fall. As in a war, there are zones of neutrality where enemies can meet on equal terms and come together to forge common notions of peace.

Needless to say, we believe that Van Til’s temporal or historical (could we not say “eschatological”?) understanding of both the belief/unbelief antithesis and common grace are an improvement.¹
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Some Personal Observations

At this point in the series, We would like to reflect on some of the issues that have been raised in our survey of Van Til’s critical appropriation of Benjamin B. Warfield and Abraham Kuyper.

First let us consider Warfield.

We have attempted to be consistent in describing Warfield’s apologetic method as “classical.” In other words, Warfield follows the two-stage method in which he first deals with questions concerning the existence of a generic deity along with the possibility of communication between this god and man (and also with the nature of man’s ability to receive divine communication) - and all of this is done within a philosophical context apparently divorced from any Scriptural considerations. Then, and after laying this groundwork, Warfield looks at the historical evidence of Holy Scripture to see if it is, in fact, such a divine communication as he proves to be merely possible in the first stage of the method.
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Warfield, as we have already noted, is very critical of this placement. Warfield understands apologetics to be the discipline that precedes the other theological tasks and which clears and prepares the ground for exegesis, historical theology, systematics, and practical theology.

Warfield calls theology done along the lines of this model a “grand assumption” without an apologetic that precedes the enterprise. In other words, how do we know that what we are saying bears any relationship to the truth? As far as I can tell, Warfield and Kuyper are both right and wrong at this point.

Kuyper is correct to note that apologetics arises from within the study of the Bible and Reformed dogmatics and is not something done apart from the very content of Reformed dogmatics. For which/what God do we seek to defend or vindicate? Warfield’s own understanding of apologetics leaves one in no doubt that when doing apologetics, the deity defended is not, at least explicitly, the God of the Bible. He (in good classical fashion) seeks to argue for a generic deity. Once we make space for this generic deity we can then consider specific candidates. However, Warfield is correct to note that apologetics needs to present the truth claims of the gospel without embarrassment.¹
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